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Sergeant Peter Collins' cousin, journalist and photographer, Alan Piper, is living next door to the neighbours from Hell. They build a deck that overlooks his patio and monitor his every movement. Under the cover of darkness they steal plants and building materials from his garden, but when his gate and gatepost disappear he calls in the police who advise him to put up a CCTV camera. Alan has a better idea. Mousy civil servant Kacy Howell is amazed to suddenly find herself the centre of attention at work and showered with unprompted gifts of flowers, chocolates and - discreetly wrapped sex toys. Her husband, George, is bewildered until a colleague shows him a pornographic magazine aimed at the amateur photographer.Before George finds out if the photos are real, Kacy is found battered to death on the decking that overlooks Alan's garden. Inspector Trevor Joseph and Sergeant Peter Collins find themselves wanting to look beyond the obvious suspect for a murder, which Kacy's neighbours have already Christened 'justifiable homocide'.
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1.0 out of 5 stars
A Not-Deserved Publication,
This review is from: A Well-deserved Murder (Paperback)
I did wonder how Katherine John came to be published, let alone make the claim that she is Wales's best-selling author.... and now I know: self-publish, and you can be anybody you want! A WELL-DESERVED MURDER has to be one of the worst novels I have *ever* read in my life. I thought I would give Mrs. John another go having given up trying to wade through MURDER OF A DEAD MAN some years previously, thinking maybe I was too picky. But first impressions count.The characters in AWDM are ghosts. Not the good kind of ghosts, either. By 'good kind' I mean the ghosts that haunt you. I could not see or hear or smell them - how old is John's hero, Trevor Joseph? Is he tall? Fat? Dark? Who knows? - and thus could not imagine them. Even their names are boring: as anyone who lives in Wales knows, even in north Wales there is a cornucopia of surnames from around the world, rather than the assortment of stereotypical Welsh (Jenkins isn't very imaginative, is it?) and Anglo-Saxon examples given here. Though there is a drug impresario called the 'Red Dragon', a stunning bit of originality. One or two minor characters are given very perfunctory descriptions but this just jars when the main characters are not described at all. These are the flat characters E.M. Forster warned us about. I didn't care very much what happened to anybody, not even Joseph's ankle-biter. Wales is an amazing country of land- and seascapes that have to be seen to be believed. In Mrs. John's books there is no description of the land, or the sky, or the magnificent views of the Gower Peninsula (such things can be worked into crime novels without interfering with the action, as James Lee Burke does so brilliantly), or even if her characters work and live in a city, or a town, or a rundown seaside resort. There is no atmosphere and barely any weather. As for the plot, it seems to consist mainly of police officers of the wrong rank (inspectors don't run round questioning suspects) interviewing one faceless character after another in a series of arid and colourless rooms. But all is not lost. In a way the book *is* refreshing because Mrs. John fearlessly breaks the cardinal rule of the creative writing nazis, the first of several commandments of post-modern writing: and that is 'Show, Don't Tell' (the second is 'Eschew Adverbs', also merrily broken in AWDM). The book pretty much tells you everything you need to know about how to write and publish a mediocre novel set in a finished product full of typos and inconsistent punctuation. (The cover looks great, though, if you haven't got a blood phobia.) This is writing and publishing by numbers. But Mrs. John should give hope to all the writers out there who are too self-critical of their work or think they can't get published: my darlings, you can, if only you buy your ink by the gallon.
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